Video: Building your vector pattern with a bounding box

Now, that we've drawn out our design, I'm going to show you how to go about building your vector artwork to create your final pattern tile. So, let's dive into it. So, you saw draw this design out in analog using tracing paper and a light pad. And, that helped me to compose my design in analog. You can see the drawn design here, which I've scanned in and placed in the illustrator. Just out of curiosity this image is at I believe 600 to 800 DPI.

Patterns have been a part of cultures around the globe for centuries. From fashion and branding to interior design and signage, patterns blanket and beautify our world. Designers are often asked to create new patterns from scratch, and although digital tools make the process easier than ever, it can still be a perplexing task.

In this installment of Drawing Vector Graphics, Von Glitschka demystifies the pattern design process, explaining tessellations (mathematical tiles that lie at the heart of patterns) and visiting the various methods of creating new patterns. He shows how to build repeating patterns with Illustrator's pattern tools and pattern brushes, and incorporate patterns into your design. The course also features patterns from some of the industry's most inspiring designers.

Building your vector pattern with a bounding box

Now, that we've drawn out our design, I'm going to show you howto go about building your vector artwork to create your final pattern tile.So, let's dive into it.So, you saw draw this design out in analog using tracing paper and a light pad.And, that helped me to compose my design in analog.You can see the drawn design here, whichI've scanned in and placed in the illustrator.Just out of curiosity this image is at I believe 600 to 800 DPI.

I usually fluctuate in between those ranges.And, you can see my bounding box here.The first thing I'll do is I'll place it on it's own layer.And, I'll adjust the opacity to 20% becauseI don't want it to be full strength.I want it to be kind of tinted back and I'll lock the layers, so I don't move it.Another thing I do is that at this point I'll snap my guidesto that bounding box I've drawn out so you can see the guides here.But, I manage guides a little different than most people and illustrator guidesare considered objects, meaning you can selectthem with other elements and move them.

I don't really like that behavior, so Imanage them by putting them on their own layer.This allows me at any time to toggle them off and on and they won't accidentally getembedded into our content, which is important when youare copying and pasting and it can cause problems.So, now that I have them established, I'm going to turn them off because I alreadyused them to build my base in vector art so you can see that right here.And, I'm going to zoom in just on a few elements here just soyou can really see how the base vector are aligns with the underline sketch.

Now, my sketch acts as my road map.And, if you want to know more information about that, then Isuggest you check out my original drawing vector graphics course onlynda.com, which goes over how to go from analog to digitalprecisely and build out your vector shapes with precision and elegance.And so, that's what I use to create the artwork you see here.Now, that's not to say that I don't make changes as I go along.I don't improve it as I'm starting to work through my design.

With this specific design, however, you can see I have my bounding boxestablish and that's going to be the key for building all of my patters.It's going to enable me to build my pattern, sothat I can create a stand alone tile pattern, andit's also going to enable me to create a patternthat's free floating that will work well with Illustrators pattern tool.All of those are going to be demonstrated throughout thecourse, but for this initial graphic here, I'm going toshow you how to use the bounding box and startto kind of beta test how your repeat's going to work.

Once again, any content that flows off theleft, so we're going to select those elements here.It's going to come in on the right, so ifI just select this entire design, select the bounding box.We're going to go Command+c, Command+f, which is copy and paste infront, or if you have the F key set up F3.Once you have that with smart guides turned on, itwill tell you when you are over an anchor point.You will click hold and you'll slide it over holding shift down so it locks ata 90 degree until you get over the other anchor point and it'll snap into place.

When you let go, you can now see howit's going to relate with other elements in your design.And, as you do this, you can see that even though in our sketch stage, it lookedokay, we're running into some problems here whereelements are going to overlap, and we don't want that.So, that's telling us we're going to have to make some adjustments to our art.And, that's the whole process of kind of art directing yourself as you build.So, our sketch stage got us about95% there, but we've already determined after we'vebuilt our base factor art that we're going tohave to make some adjustments to our art.

So, I'm going to turn on another layer now.These are colored blue.And, I just want to make a comparison between this and the layer below it, soI'm going to toggle it on and off, andyou can see we've made some art directive changes.The biggest direction, if I turn off this bottom layer, is I decidedI didn't want all of my elements to be fused to this one vine.It was just too much going on and it needed tobe able to change colors going to balance the overall design.

If I toggle that on and off, you can see how I movedelements so it didn't infuse into that specific vine part of this motif.Now, that I have everything kind of worked out in terms of making those adjustments,your bounding box is going to help you establish the exact repeat of your design.So once again, anything that goes off on theleft hand side is going to come in on the right.So, we're going to select those like we've done here.Select the bounding box and go ahead and clone these elements.

And, all I mean by clone is it's copyingand pasting those same elements on top of themselves.Once we have those, using the bounding box, we'll slide itover, holding Shift down until it locks with the other corner.Let go, and you can see how it's replicated it in from the right hand side.We'll just repeat that same methodology usingany content that goes off the top, selectthe bounding box, clone that content, select thecorner of the bounding box, hold shift down,slide it until it locks, you can see how it says intersect on the bottom right, letgo, and the this is the methodology you'll use to create a repeat pattern.

This is how you make sure your art is going tointeract with each other on every side it goes off the edge.And so, one element, a couple of elements onthe right that we'll need to do will be these.So, we'll go ahead and clone those.We'll slide those over, and you can see how we've now populated our entire repeat.Once you have this established, now you can start workingon color, because you know your repeat is going to work.

We forgot to do a few elements here, but you'd use the same methodologyto copy up these, and make sure they come in, in at the top.But, like a good cooking show, I have some of these elements prebaked, so this showshow I worked out the colors, And so, these are simple color shapes, justfills no strokes I encourage people not to build with strokes.That's my personal preference.So, all of these are simple shapes with fills.Once you have these done now, thisis a stand alone design, and it's free-floating.

Meaning, if I get rid of thebackground elements, this is just a free-floating shape.The background is a color just to helpme figure out my color composition at this point.With this design, I can now take this in toIllustrator using the pattern tool, and I can tile it.Now, I'm going to show you how to do that in another movie.I'm not going to do that right now.But, the whole reason to learn how to build a pattern usinga bounding box method is so that you can set up your artwork.

And, you can copy stuff off the edge to create your repeat, and then with thebounding box, you can select that art andin this case, we're going to use path finder.And, we can trim it.So, you can use your art untrimmed and trimmed.This is how we trim it and we just simply run Pathfinder, and weuse the bounding box to select our elements and trim the art, untilwhat you end up with is a non-trim piece of artwork.

This is your final tile design, so we're going to go ahead and group it.Now, this isn't where this pattern tile ended.I wanted more dimension to it and a lot of the methods I'm going to showin this course, you'll see them show upin multiple movies because they all interact together.They all work together, so I'm going to show yousomething that I'll cover in depth in another movie.But, it's important to flesh out in this one, to show you the full context.So, with my final art established, all I've done is I've made a copy of it.

In this case, I colored it just pink, so you could see it on screen.But, that's not the color I want to keep it at.The color that I'm going to change this to is going to be white.So, we'll go ahead and color that white.And then, in this case, I'm going to rotate this 180degrees, so you can see how I did that there.And, this looks like a convoluted mess right now, but just bear with me.It's going to make sense here in a few seconds.With that selected, we're going to change the opacity.

So, it's just barely opaque at 15%, and I'm going to de-select.And, you can see how its added this really nice subtletexturing almost, but it's not a true real world surface texture.It's a texturing created from the art itself,so Tthat's something we'll cover in more depth later.But, now that we have this final pattern design established,there's all kinds of things we can do with it.We can simply select this tile.

And, you can either go to Object, Pattern, and Make.Or, another even easier way is you canjust drag it right into your swatches pallet.And, if we click into there, once again, we'll go over thepattern tool more depth later, but just to give you a sneak peek.You can see how the pattern tool automatically creates the repeat pattern.You can see how it's repeating off the top, left, right, bottom and so forth.So, that's as easy it is to create a pattern.

We're going to go back to the art board right now and whatI want to show you is how the pattern fill specifically works.So, we have our shape here.Once we have our pattern tile established, we can just select any shape.You just want to make sure you're on the fill.And, in this case, we're going to go ahead andwe're going to color it with our patter swatch here.And, you can see how it fills it with the pattern.That's as easy it is to use a pattern within Adobe Illustrator.

Now, this specific design, I sized the pattern tiling in the relationshipof the repeat a little bit, and we'll once again go over that in another movie.So, that's this specific design.You saw me take from rough sketch andthumbnail all the way to the final pattern artwork.And, you'll see me continue to utilize this later in the course.Another pattern, and the reason why I want toshow you this one is because there is certainpatterns you can just not create without drawing itout first, and this is a good example of that.

This is based off of a tree branches, and it's very organic.I didn't want it to be free-floating.Free-floating meaning there's space around all the elements and nothingever overlaps or interacts with directly touching with the other elements.In this case, we wanted that.With this, once again, we'll go to transparency and we're going to setthe opacity just so we can see it better with our art.I'm going to turn on the base vectors.You'll see, I established the bounding box.I built out the core of this design.

This is all it is.It's just these branches, that's it.But, once we have this established, we can simply, in this case, we're going to goahead and colorize it brown and we're going to remove the stroke on it.And so, you can see what it looks like with its fill.I'm going to turn on what I'm calling repeated artwork.This is how once again we've determined that going offthe top, this is just a replication of that exact shape.Going off to the right is this one and this one.

And, it also goes off the bottom here.And, it will come up a little as shown here.It leaves the top, meaning it's going to peek in here at the bottom.But, this is how you do it without creating a pattern tile.You select your art like this.We'll turn off the repeated stuff.Actually, we're going to keep that on because we need these yellow shapes.These yellow shapes, I'm going to go over later in the course.These are what I call throw away shapes.Once you have this created, this time we'llgo up to Object, pull down to Pattern.

Go to make and it immediately takes us into the pattern tool.But, you'll see we have this gap, and it's not repeating correctlybecause it's basing the tile shape off of the size of our art.The fastest way to adjust or art is to simply click thetile tool up here in the top left of the pattern options palette.And, once you have this, and this is where these throw away shapesare going to come into place, we can pull this down and snap it.You can see how it's telling we're on the anchorpoint, and that brings in the art from the top.

We'll take this one, pull it over, snap it to thisthrow away shape, and it brings the pattern in from the right.And, we can select those and toss them,and you can see how it's replicated our pattern.All you have to do at this point is just name it.We'll just call it branches one.And, to exit this mode, you can either click done,which is, if I hide the Pathfinder palette, you can clickDone, or the easiest way is just to click anywherein the background and it exits you back to the desktop.

So, once we're back on the desktop, we're going togo ahead and turn those off, and you can seehow I've filled this shape with that same patterntile, not only brown, but I did a blue one.And, because I built it from scratch, meaningbuilt it from a drawing and figured outmy tiling with a bounding box, I also have the option of having a pattern tile.And, I'm going to show you how to use that in more depth later in the course.So, be sure to check out all the exercise files for this course.

They contain several pattern experiments you cantry using the Bounding Box principle with.And, those are going to help you toestablish this methodology in your own work flow.The more you experiment, though, with creatingrepeat patterns and using the bounding boxmethodology, the more you're going to discover andreveal new, fun ways to create interesting designs.

Learn by watching, listening, and doing, Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along Premium memberships include access to all exercise files in the library.

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Learn by watching, listening, and doing! Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along. Exercise files are available with all Premium memberships.
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